The Creation Story

Hopscotch in the Minefield came about in the manner as most ideas do — boredom.

It was within a basement sometime past midnight that Mark, after surfing the internet and probably looking at porn rolled his chair over to Steve, who was attempting to derive a modicum of enjoyment out of watching Scary Movie for the umpteenth time(and failing miserably).

“Hey Steve, I have an idea,” said Mark, having finished perusing Google Images and probably wandering onto Scalzi’s.

“Oh,” replied Steve, “How lovely.”

“I kinda wanna make a blog,” said Mark.

A fruit-basket’s worth of sarcasm exploded in Steve’s brain, but his growing weariness and mild interest in the thought of a blog meant that it all fell apart before he could say any of it. Instead he went with, “Why?”

“I dunno,” said Mark, realizing Steve was open to suggestion and just needed a little pushing. “Seems like it’d be fun. We could do a joint thing.”

“Yeah, sure,” Steve said. “Why not?”

“Cool,” said Mark. “We need a name.”

Of course, that job fell to Steve. Mark knew he couldn’t be trusted with the name of the blog. He could handle the slogan, and of course he’d have free reign on content. But the name? Too much responsibility for him to handle.

Steve first came up with something that was already taken and is, at this juncture, irrelevant(because nobody can remember it). The next thing Steve came up with was Hopscotch in the Minefield. If you would ask him how he came up with it, he’d say something about how it would fit in with what he expected of the blog’s content; a gallery of randomness and stupidity and insight and absurdity that only a fool would attempt slogging through.

In reality, Richard Pryor had said something on the television of elementary school, which made him think of recess and then recess activities, which led to the idea of hopscotch. He decided In The Minefield was amusing to tack onto the end.

So Mark set working on WordPress, and in fifteen minutes the home page of Hopscotch was given life.